"The Birthmark" … displays, I think, enough of Wright's influence—as well as Hemingway's—to justify some concern on Wright's part that Ellison might be able to steal his thunder, in time. In the story, a black man and his sister have been brought to the scene of an alleged auto accident to identify the body of their brother; they discover, when they attempt to find an identifying birthmark below the navel, that he has been lynched and castrated. Outraged but helpless, they must return home and accept the lie that Willie was hit by a car, because, as the white policeman puts it, "We don't allow no lynching round here no more."
Like a Hemingway story, "The Birthmark" is immediate and dramatic; it begins with Matt and Clara emerging from the police car to approach Willie's body. Its power is developed through the cumulative effect of the dialog, rather than through the sparse interpretive commentary of the narrator. But the dialog is dialectal rather than idiomatic; the particularities of black Southern speech are indicated orthographically. This is, of course, Wright's style and not Hemingway's—or Ellison's as we have become familiar with it in later work.
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